How Well Do You Know Your City's Transit System?

A new quiz asks you to guess the city based on an unlabeled map of bus and rail stops.

Okay, so we all know what the subway map of New York looks like, but what about the transit map of Elgin, Illinois?

Now you can find out, with a new quiz by CNT that tests your knowledge of transit systems in cities around America. Here's how it works: You see a map dotted with an unknown city's transit stops (both bus and rail) but without any other labels, boundaries, or markers. Then you have to guess which city the transit system belongs to from four options provided below the map.

The quiz has four levels of difficulty, with 10 maps in each level. The simplest one shows transit networks from cities that are pretty well-known, like the one from Boston below. (I chose Detroit ... but in my defense I've only been to Boston like once):

The next one (below) is really easy—that's obviously Chicago:

You need at least five correct answers to go to the next level. Or, if you're very confident, you take a quiz with higher difficulty straight away. In level four, for example, you might encounter a map of less familiar cities. The one below has only eight transit stops! I'm not sure which city this map belongs to, but it's definitely not Las Vegas:

About the Author

Tanvi Misra is a staff writer for CityLab covering immigrant communities, housing, economic inequality, and culture. She also authors Navigator, a weekly newsletter for urban explorers (subscribe here). Her work also appears in The Atlantic, NPR, and BBC.